Software repositories such as source control systems, archived communications between project personnel, and defect tracking systems are used to help manage the progress of software projects. Software practitioners and researchers are recognizing the benefits of mining this information to support the maintenance of software systems, improve software design/reuse, and empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. Research is now proceeding to uncover the ways in which mining these repositories can help to understand software development and software evolution, to support predictions about software development, and to exploit this knowledge in planning future development. The goal of this two-day working conference is to advance the science and practice of software engineering via the analysis of data stored in software repositories.
This year, we will solicit three tracks of papers: research, practice, and data. As in previous MSR editions, there will be a Mining Challenge and a special issue of best MSR papers in the Empirical Software Engineering journal.
For the research and practice papers, we especially encourage submissions that facilitate reproducibility and follow-up research by publicly providing data sets and tools. Publicly providing reusable research artifacts (data or tools) is not mandatory, but will strengthen the reproducibility of the research, which is an explicit evaluation criterion.
Research papers can be short papers (4 pages) and full papers (10 pages). Short research papers should discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Accepted short papers will present their ideas in a short lightning talk. Full research papers are expected to describe new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers.
Practice papers should report experiences of applying mining repository algorithms in an industry/open source organization context. Practice papers aim at reporting positive or negative experiences of applying known algorithms, but adapting existing algorithms or proposing new algorithms for practical use would be plus. Practice papers also can be short papers (4 pages) and full papers (10 pages).
Data papers. We want to encourage researchers to share their data. Data papers should describe data sets curated by their authors and made available to others. They are expected to be at most 4 pages long and should address the following: description of the data, including its source; methodology used to gather it; description of the schema used to store it, and any limitations and/or challenges of this data set. The data should be made available at the time of submission of the paper for review, but will be considered confidential until publication of the paper. Further details about data papers are available on the conference website.
In the Mining Challenge, we invite researchers to demonstrate the usefulness of their mining tools on preselected software repositories and summarize their findings in a challenge report (4 pages). Please visit the conference Web page for details about the Mining Challenge.
Accepted papers will present their work at the conference. A selection of the best research papers will be invited for consideration in a special issue of the Springer journal Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) edited by Springer.
Topics
Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:
■ Analysis of software ecosystems and mining of repositories across multiple projects
■ Models for social and development processes that occur in large software projects
■ Prediction of future software qualities via analysis of software repositories
■ Models of software project evolution based on historical repository data
■ Characterization, classification, and prediction of software defects based on analysis of software repositories
■ Techniques to model reliability and defect occurrences
■ Search-driven software development, including search techniques to assist developers in finding suitable components and code fragments for reuse, and software search engines
■ Analysis of change patterns and trends to assist in future development
■ Visualization techniques and models of mined data
■ Techniques and tools for capturing new forms of data for storage in software repositories, such as effort data, fine-grained changes, and refactoring
■ Characterization of bias in mining and guidelines to ensure quality results
■ Privacy and ethics in mining software repositories
■ Meta-models, exchange formats, and infrastructure tools to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability
■ Empirical studies on extracting data from repositories of large long-lived and/or industrial projects
■ Methods of integrating mined data from various historical sources
■ Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
■ Mining software licensing and copyrights
■ Mining execution traces and logs
■ Analysis of natural language artifacts in software repositories
Submission
All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE/MSR 2015 Formatting Instructions and must not exceed the page limits (research/practice papers: 10 pages; short papers: 4 pages; data papers: 4 pages; challenge reports: 4 pages), including all text, references, appendices and figures. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format.
Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere for the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission.
Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair.
Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an ACM Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the results at the MSR 2015 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings.